The future of video game graphics - or a load of old nonsense?

Euclideon says games won't be the same again; Notch accuses Aussies of selling a "scam"

An Australian computer graphics company has released a video showcase of its new tech - which it claims can revolutionise the future of games software.

However, not everyone is quite so convinced. Minecraft creator Markus 'Notch' Persson - having become irritated by the popularity of the video - has poured scorn on the company's claims.

Euclideon says that it has "found a way to give computer graphics unlimited power".

CEO Bruce Robert Dell explains in the video: "In the graphics industry, everyone is used to using polygons, so we'd thought we'd build a polygon converter. By converting polygons into Unlimited Detail point cloud data, you can then run them in unlimited quantities. We've converted them at a rate of 64 atoms per cubic millimeter. If you're not sure how small a cubic millimetre is, that's a rate of 1,000,000 atoms per cubic inch."

He adds: "Your game environments will also be real. When I say real I mean made of little atoms just like our real world. Your game environments until now have been filled with a bunch of tricks to try and deal with the low polygon budget.".

Big promises, and not ones that Notch is at all convinced by. He writes on his blog:

"Perhaps you've seen the videos about some groundbreaking "unlimited detail" rendering technology? Well, it is a scam.

"They made a voxel renderer, probably based on sparse voxel octrees. That's cool and all, but.. To quote the video, the island in the video is one km^2. Let's assume a modest island height of just eight meters, and we end up with 0.008 km^3. At 64 atoms per cubic millimeter (four per millimeter), that is a total of 512 000 000 000 000 000 atoms.

"If each voxel is made up of one byte of data, that is a total of 512 petabytes of information, or about 170 000 three-terrabyte harddrives full of information. In reality, you will need way more than just one byte of data per voxel to do colors and lighting, and the island is probably way taller than just eight meters, so that estimate is very optimistic. So obviously, it's not made up of that many unique voxels."